Hard reset a single file in git

July 1, 2014

01 July 2014 - Redwood City, CA

I feel like, at a certain point in time, I used to be able to run the command git reset --hard path/to/file. However this might have been me only working with single files, because now I frequently get the error:

fatal: Cannot do hard reset with paths.

This one has been a tiny thorn in my side - perhaps ever since I upgraded to git 2.0 - or maybe it’s a problem cause by extending git with hub (PS get hub here and now if you haven’t heard of it- maybe I’ll write something on this later). Most likely it was just my insanity.

The solution is:

git checkout -- path/to/file

This performs a file-specific git checkout. Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Taking a closer look, you can also perform git checkout <branch_name> -- <paths> to get copies of files from different branches.

As always, check out the man files (man git-checkout) for more! Also check out git reset –patch too! link